Three millennia ago, a small, prosperous farming community briefly flourished in the freshwater marshes of eastern England. The residents lived in a group of round houses with thatched roofs, built on wooden stilts above a canal of the River Nene, which flows into the North Sea. They wore garments of fine flax linen, with pleats and tasselled hems; traded for glass and amber beads imported from places as far away as modern-day Iran; drank from delicate clay poppy heads; dined on pig’s trotter and honey-glazed venison, and fed table scraps to their dogs.
Within a year of its construction, this prehistoric idyll came to a dramatic end. A catastrophic fire ripped through the complex; the buildings collapsed and the villagers fled, leaving behind their clothing, tools and weapons. Everything, including the porridge left in cooking pots, crashed through the burning thatch floors into the thick, sticky reed fields below and stayed there. Ultimately, the objects, hidden and buried, sank into more than seven feet of seeping peat and silt. The river gradually moved away from the encampment, but the rubble remained intact for almost 3,000 years. an account of daily life at the end of the British Bronze Age, from 2500 BC to 800 BC
That frozen moment in time is the subject of two monographs published Tuesday by Cambridge University. Based on a ten-month excavation of what is now known as Must Farm Quarry, a submerged and superbly preserved settlement in the shadow of a potato chip factory 75 miles north of London, the investigations are as detailed as a forensic investigation report of a site offense. One article, a site synthesis, runs to 323 pages; the other, for specialists, is almost 1,000 pages longer.
“This didn’t feel like archaeology,” says Mark Knight, project director and one of the paper’s authors. “At times, excavating the site felt somewhat rude and intrusive, as if we had emerged after a tragedy, searched through someone’s belongings and caught a glimpse of what he did one day in 850 BC”
Evidence for life in the British Bronze Age has traditionally come from fortified and religious sites often found in high, arid landscapes. Most of the evidence consists of pottery, flint tools and bones. “In general, we have to work with small bits and pieces and barely visible remains of houses, and read between the lines,” says Harry Fokkens, archaeologist at Leiden University. To convince anyone that such places were once thriving settlements takes a little imagination.
Paul Pettitt, a Palaeolithic archaeologist at the University of Durham who was not involved in the new research, said the monograph – a case study of exceptional preservation combined with highly skilled excavations – is a reminder that domesticity in the period was “colourful, rich, varied and not only about metal weapons, as the public’s love for metal detecting would suggest.”
Sanded down
Francis Pryor, a British archaeologist best known for his 1982 discovery of Flag Fen, a Bronze Age site a mile from Must Farm, added: “The Must Farm report changes our understanding of British society in the millennium before the Roman conquest, 2000 years ago. past. Far from being primitive, Bronze Age communities lived in harmony with their neighbors, enjoying life in warm, dry houses with excellent food.”
Until ten years ago, the so-called Pompeii of the Fens was buried in a brick quarry. The original hamlet would have been twice as large – mining in the 20th century destroyed half the archaeological site – and possibly housed several dozen people in family units.
What remained were four substantial roundhouses and a small, square entranceway, raised on a wooden platform and surrounded by a two-metre high palisade of sharpened ash poles, a barrier undoubtedly designed for defence. The green wood, fresh wood chips and lack of repairs, reconstruction or insect damage suggested the complex was relatively new at the time of the fire.
An analysis of the outer annual rings of the scorched hardwood indicated late autumn or early winter as the start date, while the skeletons of three- to six-month-old lambs and the charred larvae of a local flea species suggested that the settlement was destroyed in the summer or early autumn.
Piecing together the material culture of these ancient Britons, the research reveals how the houses were built and the household goods within them, what the inhabitants ate and how their clothing was made.
The archaeologists excavated, among other things, 180 textile and fiber items (yarns, fabrics, knotted nets), 160 wooden artifacts (bobbins, benches, handles for metal tools and wheels), 120 earthenware vessels (bowls, pots, jugs) and 90 pieces. of metalwork (sickles, axes, chisels, a dagger, a hand razor for cutting hair). Masses of beads that had formed part of an elaborate chain indicated a level of sophistication rarely associated with Bronze Age England.
“The interesting thing about this is that it is an inventory of five Bronze Age households,” Mr Knight said. “It was like everyone had a wedding registry for a fancy department store.”
Although the bones of fish, cattle, sheep and pigs were pulled from the waste piles (halos of waste dumped from the huts above), there was no evidence of human casualties. The skull of a young woman turned up outside a home, but because it had been polished by repeated touch, researchers decided it was more likely a memento or ritual decoration than a battle trophy. “Auntie’s skull is taped over the front door,” Mr. Knight speculated.
Mosquitoes and cold porridge
Interest in Must Farm was first sparked in 1999 when an archaeologist from the University of Cambridge spotted a series of oak posts protruding from the clay beds of the quarry. Dendrochronology dated the poles to prehistoric times, and excitement grew when preliminary excavations unearthed fish traps, bronze swords and spearheads.
The discovery of nine log boats – canoes as long as 8 meters – buried in the mud hinted at the vast wetlands that once covered the region. “Boat trips through reed marshes into the woodlands would have been made many times during the site’s short lifespan,” says Chris Wakefield, the project’s archaeologist. “In the summer that meant crossing mosquito clouds.”
A major survey conducted by the University of Cambridge in 2015 and 2016 exposed the palisade fence, lightweight walkways, the ruins of the roof of a round house and walls of woven willow branches, called wattles. The way the wood fell – some vertically, others in eerie, geometric lines – allowed the researchers to map the layout of the circular architecture. One house had a floor area of about 500 square meters and appeared to have clear ‘activity zones’, similar to rooms in a modern home.
The thatched roofs had three layers. The base layer of insulating straw was covered with peat – soil formed by dead but not yet completely decayed plants – and finished with clay, which may have formed a chimney or flue near the top of the roof. “People were confident and experienced housebuilders,” Mr Knight said. “They had a blueprint that worked beautifully for a drowned landscape.”
In what was probably the kitchen of a home, there were bronze knives, wooden bowls and clay pots, some of which were even nested. “There was a simple aesthetic at work that felt coherent and unified,” Mr. Knight said. A clay bowl with the maker’s fingerprints still contained his last meal: a wheat porridge mixed with animal fat, possibly from a goat or red deer. A spatula rested against the inside of the bowl.
The craftsmanship of the recovered relics and the presence of log boats, perhaps the only reliable means of transportation, led researchers to conclude that the site may not have been an isolated outpost, but a busy intersection of trade routes. “There was a sense that these early swamp people were at the top of their society and had access to whatever was available at the time,” Mr Knight said. “At the end of the Bronze Age, the rivers of eastern England were the place for trade and connections; sites like Stonehenge were now on the periphery.”
Story of the tapeworm
The Must Farm community harvested crops and cut trees on the nearest dry land. Sheep and cattle also grazed there. Boar and deer were hunted in the local forests – within a three kilometer radius of the farm, the researchers estimated. “The irony is that the community wanted to live on the water, yet their economy was a land-based economy,” Mr Knight said.
Apparently the food was so plentiful that the villagers almost ignored the fish, eels and waterfowl swimming around the settlement’s foundations. With good reason, as it turns out: sanitation was a dubious proposition in the fens. Sausage-shaped blobs found in the settlement’s murky sediment turned out to be fossils of dog and human feces, many of which were infused with fish tapeworm eggs and giant kidney worms obtained from foraging in the stagnant waterways. The tapeworms are flat, ribbon-like parasites that wrap around people’s intestines and can grow up to 30 feet in length. The kidney worms stop at a distance of one meter, but can destroy vital organs.
Two questions remained unanswered in Cambridge’s otherwise extensive monographs: was the fire the result of an accident, or an attack by rivals perhaps jealous of the residents’ wealth? And why didn’t any Bronze Agers bother to pick up all that soggy stuff?
“A settlement like this would have had a shelf life of perhaps a generation, and the people who built it had clearly built similar sites before,” said David Gibson, a Cambridge archaeologist who worked on the study. “They may have simply started over after the fire.”